Origin Joker
by Yin Long Nocturne
Summary: October of 1914, in the aftermath of a mission that goes to hell, Yuuki thinks about the people who are really made to be spies. Part of the Joker Series. Complete.
1. The Cover

A/N: This is the earliest fic in the Joker series, it's based loosely on an RL event early in WWI - the Siege of Tsingtau by French/British/Russian/Japanese troops when the area was held by Germany - so it takes place in October of 1914.

* * *

They met the other troops outside Weifang, the closet town of decent size outside of German lands. The Colonel had complained all the way there because they had had to take almost as many translators as troops, and they soon found that the same was true for the others as well. Some of the British spoke French, some of the Russians spoke English, but in general only the translators could speak freely with anyone but their own comrades.

It was a disaster. Four countries, four methodologies, and everyone watching for betrayal. In the end, they'd gotten caught because the men they'd sent in to Tsingtau were tripped up. They had no warning, just the slow realisation that the troops were being picked off. The British were the first to realise, and they quietly sent out a small group with the information they had managed to collect to escape to the north west.

It took a week: a week of people leaving to get supplies and not coming back; a week of missed meetings; a week of dead bodies being found with foreign dogtags under their shirts; a week of whispering by the locals. By the end of that week they had been decimated, two of the French had managed to make a supply run to a nearby town and got word back to the rest of them that they were retreating toward the border. The rest had been killed, and Yuuki has to careful keep record of who didn't check in, whose body had been found in a back alley, who didn't return in the morning.

Soon, he is last one left. He doesn't know if they didn't find him, or if they left him alive on purpose.

In a last ditch, desperate attempt, he throws away his pride. Sheds the uniform he'd been so proud of, stuffs the marks of his station into the tips of his shoes and dresses in the rags of the local peasants. He smears his face with dirt, and keeps his head down. The only things he keeps with him is the log of his squads orders and actions and a small pen, he keeps them bound flat to his stomach with the shreds of his old shirt, and a small pouch of money.

He walks his way out, doesn't get on trains or hail cabs. He does everything he can to just be a filthy peasant. Yuuki learns quickly to play up a limp and a cough after he gets one to many sideways glances and realises that he looks like he should have been drafted. He lets his hair grow out ragged to cover his eyes, speaks little to hide his origins and eventually sneaks his way onto a cargo ship bound for Japan.

Being back on home soil is both a relief so intense it threatens to bring him to his knees, and the most frightening prospect yet. It's been too long, he's probably been marked as KIA like the rest of his squad, and the only proof he has of his identity is a log, and tags he could have filched of the body of the 'real' Warrant Officer Yuuki. He spends his first night in Japan curled up into a ball behind a warehouse in the docks, too jittery to really sleep.

The next morning he heads away from the port town, in the country it's easy to hide, and he can chance hiding the log while he bathes in a stream. He hasn't been able to wash since he left China, four days and he can smell himself over the dirt and the smell of salt and seaweed that had permeated the hold.

* * *

Months later, when he's been formally reinstated after undergoing thorough investigation and interrogation, Yuuki is assigned to a new squad and a new mission. It goes smoothly, as much as they ever do, but after the hell his last turned into, well. This one gives Yuuki plenty of opportunities to watch. He watches the enemy, his fellow officers, the soldiers in their squads, he watches the civilians: rich and poor alike. He watches and learns.

Yuuki becomes hyper aware, during that mission, of the people no one else watches. The ones who are implicitly trusted, the ones who are treated with automatic disdain. Each type is different, but they all have one common thread, these are the people who are ignored when it comes to the so-called 'secrets' of the rich and important. The houseboys, the beggars, the doormen and the waitresses. The kind young boy who's helped the blacksmith for months now, the old lady who's done the laundry for the big house for years.

The people who collect secrets.

He watches the way the locals stiffen up when his squad comes through, as if the very presence of their uniform makes them the most noticeable thing in sight. And as they occupy the focus, he sees the ones who fade into the background. See sharp eyes and ear that catalogue and store. Starts to recognise the ones who'll hold court after they leave. The ones who'll deliberate once they are all tucked up in their beds for the night.

Yuuki watches and learns and remembers. He thinks of the men who'd gone into the Tsingtau and its surrounding area to get the information they'd needed to pull off their strategy. Military men to the last, patriotic and proud, and utterly unable to completely conceal it. The kind of men who didn't look completely comfortable unless they were in a stiff collared jacket with their rank insignia proudly displayed.

He looks at the information gatherers and the secret keepers in the places his squad passes through and thinks, 'This is what they should have been. Or been able to become.'

When Yuuki had given his report, on that shit show of a mission that had left him hitching his way back to Japan around a siege, he had very carefully not implicated anyone. In words not said, hovering in the breaths between, he had asked why. Why were the 'spies' - he can barely bear to give those fools the title - so ill suited? So inflexible? Why was the Imperial Army jeopardising their campaigns and their soldiers like that?

The answer he got was just as unspoken. 'We will not stoop to cowardly tactics. Better to die with honour, than to live in shame.' And the undercurrent that ran beneath it of 'we are superior' that blinded them. Their pride, the very thing he had abandoned during his long journey home, stopped them from realising where the true potential for intelligence operatives came from.

It didn't come from the military, with their stiff and proud soldiers, and it didn't come from the heirs of rich men, so sure of their worth and power. It came from the people who could bend and not break, the ones who could watch and listen while enduring. The ones who didn't need to be in the middle, the ones who could dig themselves in and wait.


	2. The Underneath

Chapter summary: The reality of Arisaki Akira, and the sold out spy. The parts the form the man and the myth of Yuuki.

A/N: This attempts to tie in the backstory of Yuuki given in Pursuit (ep 10) and Coffin (ep 11). Some things are vague, purposefully, but also because I haven't written a warzone - in any sense - before.

Note that some minor edits have been made on chapter 1, and really this is best read in one hit.

* * *

The true Warrant Officer, a young man named Arisaki Akira had already become disillusioned to the Imperial Army. He'd been expelled from the Army Academy for expressing sentiments that they called 'cowardly'. Arisaki had refused to give up though, he may not have been able to become a blindly patriotic soldier, but he still wanted to be involved, to be a help and not a hindrance, to his country. After a time studying abroad in Europe, Arisaki had returned an enlisted as a volunteer soldier.

It was because of that that he was chosen for the intelligence mission. The things he had said, that had lead to his expulsion, had been recorded, and now the Imperial Army saw a use for his 'cowardly' outlook. He'd heard them talking from outside the meeting room, 'He's the perfect option, loyal to Japan, an amount of military training, and the cowardly type to hold onto his life. If nothing else we can trust he will survive to bring the information back to us, and if he dies… Well it's no great loss."

Hearing that had only compounded his feelings about the Imperial Army, every life was precious, to waste it on foolish ideals seemed an irredeemably disrespectful thing to do. But he went on that mission, it would help Japan, and so he would put up with the loyal, ignorant soldiers. Arisaki would get them their information, and he would survive.

Only it wasn't that simple, far too quickly the mission was falling apart around their ears. Their allies had snuck out however they could; Arisaki himself had given an encoded sheaf of information to the most nondescript soldier in the Japanese unit, then given the man strict orders to avoid all conflict and get himself back to home soil as fast as practically possible while remaining largely unnoticed.

He had stayed until the end, carefully documenting the movements of their allies, their own soldiers, the enemy. Documenting deaths and disappearances, supplies and the intelligence the other agents brought back. His time in Europe had taught him many languages, but he wasn't there as a translator and so the other soldiers let their tongues wag around him in a way they wouldn't have if they'd known he could understand them perfectly fine.

Akira didn't know why he was left alive, perhaps they missed him, perhaps he was to be the message bearer. But when the last of the combined squadron had left and not returned, Akira headed southeast, toward German occupied lands. All the useful information they had collected for use in pre-battle tactics and strategy had been sent back, now the best thing for him to do was to continue gathering information and prepare to rendezvous with the Japanese troops during the battle.

* * *

The man who becomes Yuuki is running when he arrives in Weifang, only a few weeks before the Siege he doesn't know is going to happen will start. He is running, and cursing the Imperial Army, because someone there had decided that he was an acceptable loss. The German man who led his interrogation had revealed they had discovered him, and his true identity, because of a leak directly from the General Staff Headquarters. A leak from that high up didn't happen by accident, his operation had been deemed a loose end by someone with enough power and distance to casually sign off on his destruction.

And so he ends up in Weifang, shivering and puffing out clouds of white breath to match the snow. This is outside the German occupied area, he should be safe. For the value of safe that belongs to a spy in enemy territory who's just been cut loose. He's on his own now, and despite the information he's handled in the past year, he doesn't know enough about the current situation. After his wounds have healed, he will have to head back into the 'fire', back into the German annex of China. If he's lucky he'll be able to sneak onto a boat in the port, and make his way back to Japan. Even if he can't, he has contacts there and he's familiar with the back alleys and all the dead little nooks and crannies. He's confident he can hide out in the slums for quite some time before they track him down.

He can't deny that a part of him longs for revenge, against the men who'd captured him, against the ones in the Imperial Army who had decided his life wasn't worth the information he could bring them in future.

The man who will be Yuuki, sighs and wraps his arms around himself in a vain attempt to trap some warmth into his thin frame, before heading towards a cluster of buildings. He ends up slumped near the back of an inn, it must be near the laundry room or the kitchens because the wall radiates a subtle heat and he soon slips into an exhausted sleep despite the openness of his position.

* * *

Arisaki pays no obvious attention the scruffy man slumped outside the back door into the inn. He quietly watches as the man naps, shivering slightly as night falls again and the temperature drops below freezing. He leaves three days later, having begged some food and an old coat off one of staff. Arisaki concludes that he was just a random unfortunate, not someone who had figured out the purpose of their presence in Weifang - not that there weren't already far too many people who had.

Arisaki expect to never see the man again. He certainly isn't expecting to duck for cover into an abandoned building to see that man again, peering out a window and cursing under his breath in fluent and foul Japanese.

To say it gives him pause, is a great understatement. But their second meeting is perhaps fated, because out of it Arisaki finds a comrade, a _nakama._ Or perhaps he creates one, takes the man's burgeoning hatred of the ways of the Imperial Army and tempers it with his observations of the intelligence gathering mission. In the week they are stuck, holed up in the middle of a siege, he learns a lot about this man. This man who never gives his name, not that Arisaki does either, but was part of a roughshod spy agency that poached from the War Academies.

In back alleys and basements thick with desperation and fear, they share their stories and start to build up a picture. A re-reckoning of what a true spy agency would be. Something lasting, the slow creation of a giant spider's web that could cover the whole world, feeding information back into its hub - their beloved Japan.

But Arisaki never gets to see that, they had split up on their way out, the conflict had mostly died down, but it still wasn't safe to do more that flit between the shadows. He gets caught, goes through a bawdy house that happens to be a known hangout of the German higher ups and gets caught in the crossfire of a gas attack. He only gets little of it, before he's running out, into the relatively clear air of the backstreets. But soon after he meets up with the man again, his vision is fuzzing in and out of focus and he's wobbly on his feet.

As Arisaki's world fades to black, his last thought is a hope that the man will survive this somehow, and a lingering longing for home soil. But the man had lost his left hand, in an incident not unlike the one that had caught Arisaki. He had turned up haloed in the smell of burning meat and smoke, the cauterized stump held against his chest with the shreds of a shirt. Arisaki hadn't asked, but both of them had felt the nipping of the hellhounds on their heels, their luck was running out.


End file.
